Financial technology start-ups are surprisingly anti-establishment. “[The banks] hate it,” says Chris Brycki, a former hedge fund and investment bank portfolio manager and founder of retail investment platform Stockspot. “I wrote a piece in an Australian paper recently about the effect of disruptive technology, criticising one bank in particular, and it put out a press release saying how good its systems are. It shows that they are worried about disruptive firms taking a piece of their pie.”
Stockspot is a finalist at this year’s Innotribe Startup Challenge, a competition that makes use of the enormous aggregation of financial technology expertise attracted by the Sibos conference. The challenge gives those experts some food for thought, and gives the competitors, a combination of start-up firms and small innovators, some exposure to the face of finance.
